From: The
Times English Music Festival, Dorchester Abbey, Dorchester-On-Thames By Geoff Brown Published: May 28, 2008
Not every note that followed in the second English Music Festival conjured oak trees and grazing sheep. But the music, mostly gathered from the tuneful parts of the 20th century, was always English, and often rarely heard. Em Marshall, the festival's director, wouldn't want it any other way. The first concert corralled an extraordinary collection of rarities, dispatched with zeal by the BBC Concert Orchestra and conductor Barry Wordsworth. I can't easily imagine a regular concert life for The Birds of Rhiannon, a loosely knit symphonic poem from the cantankerous and flamboyant Josef Holbrooke, featuring striking moments bobbing up and down in a watery Straussian sea. Still, it was very good to hear it live once. The same was true of Alan Rawsthorne's Practical Cats, an orchestra-and-narrator piece from 1954, nicely stamped with feline chromatic phrases typical of the composer but burdened by his tendency to overscore and the wordy weight of T. S. Eliot's Old Possum poems. You missed the quick wit and colours of Façade. In Dorchester Abbey you missed clarity, too. The church's acoustics were no friend to this music, nor to the light-voiced narrator, Jeremy Nicholas. Now for the unadulterated successes. Alexander Mackenzie's Victorian morsel Benedictus, a touching tune effectively orchestrated, resembled Elgar minus the nobility and harmonic kinks. But it spoke clearly and sincerely; it deserves to live again. So, definitely, does Granville Bantock's Celtic Symphony for strings and six extravagant harps. The BBC rounded up three, although they still made a terrific noise. Golden arpeggios billowed through this late, unusually compact score from the genial master of Edwardian exotica, who liked to wear oriental costume even at home in Birmingham. The BBC Concert Orchestra strings needed, it's true, a little more velvet ribbing. But nothing could extinguish the power of this piece as it progressed through yearning, sea storm, folk reel and contemplation, wonderfully fusing English melancholy with Celtic fire. This revival alone made the concert, and this English Music Festival, worthwhile.  From: The Church Times Jewel of an English celebration Roderic Dunnett enjoys a festival in Dorchester Abbey A REMARKABLE FESTIVAL made its first appearance in Dorchester Abbey, near the Thames a few miles south of Oxford, two years ago. Founded by a visionary artistic director, Em Marshall, it was devoted solely to English music, and included not just familiar names, but many that are not. The festival pans across British (not necessarily
English) worthies from Sir Alexander Mackenzie and Vaughan Williams’s
Socialist-minded comrade Rutland Boughton to mid-20th-century composers
such as Finzi’s friends Howard Ferguson, Edmund Rubbra, and
William Lloyd Webber (this was his orchestral Nocturne; now let’s
have his ravishing Aurora), who were almost systematically eclipsed
by the Serialist mantras of the 1960s. Begun by Artistic Director Em Marshall in 2006, the English Music Festival has become a major event remarkably quickly as this year's programme clearly showed. The inaugural concert by the BBC Concert Orchestra consisted of works by Parry, Holbrooke, Rawsthorne and Alexander Mackenzie and concluded with Bantock's Celtic Symphony for strings and six harps - far too rarely played, though worthwhile with only three harps as here. Three or four equally interesting events took place every day over the extended weekend. Purcell, Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Finzi, Holst, Britten and Bridge were performed of course but also great deal more; so much in fact that the programme read like a history of musical activity from mediaeval England through to the present day. The festival ended with a concert of special English Music Festival commissions from Ronald Corp, David Owen Norris, Matthew Curtis, Philip Lane, Cecilia McDowall and Paul Carr: no mean feat for such a young enterprise and something for which the organisers and sponsors deserve much praise. On Sunday the 25th, the only day when I was able to be present and sadly not for all of it, four concerts were programmed. The Bridge Quartet played music by Alwyn, Bridge, Purcell/Britten and Delius in Radley College Chapel and later the Amaretti Chamber Orchestra from Manchester gathered in the college's Silk Hall - a purpose built music facility for the students - to play Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Ireland and Elgar. The Amaretti Orchestra is a group of string players, some professional, some music teachers and others who are experienced amateurs who gathered together in 2004 with the twin objectives of performing to the highest standards possible and of raising money for charities. Both goals have been pursued vigorously and with great success ever since. From 2005 onwards, Louise Latham, a professional orchestral violinist and a teacher at Lancaster University, has been the group's conductor. Their concert consisted of two very familiar works, Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia and Elgar's Introduction and Allegro, paired respectively with Finzi's Clarinet Concerto and John Ireland's lyrical Downland Suite (in the string version by Ireland's pupil Geoffrey Bush). It was easy to understand the orchestra's reputation for excellence from the outset as they began with the Tallis Fantasia, clearly undaunted by having an audience of 300 or so people sitting close up to them in the relatively cramped confines of the hall. Apart from a few minor lapses of intonation and ensemble here and there, the orchestral sound was full, warm and well rounded and each piece was played with evident affection, particularly the Finzi Concerto - with David Campbell as its eminent soloist - in which the work's restless and edgy first movement, the rapturous and moving second, and the final perky rondo were all brought off equally skilfully. The full-house audience clearly enjoyed the concert enormously and while both the Vaughan Williams and the Elgar brought the expected enthusiastic applause, it was good to hear similarly warm responses to the Finzi and the Ireland. An interesting talk by MusicWeb reviewer John Leeman, on English literature and European Romantic Music, followed this concert and began by challenging its own audience. What connected, we were asked, America's Hail to the Chief anthem, the US black statesman Frederick Douglass, the Ku Klux Klan, a Scottish village needing a special railway line to accommodate a rush of tourism and a Rossini opera? Nobody knew and the answer turned out to be Sir Walter Scott's poem, The Lady of the Lake. As John went on to explain, the success of Scott's writing was enormous in his time and plots and imagery from it were taken up by a surprisingly large group of composers. After many musical examples from works based on Scott, Byron and Shakespeare, the talk ended with another brain teaser, which almost everyone failed miserably yet again. Early Wagner sounds just like Sullivan? Yes, it does. I missed the early evening concert of music by Arne and Linley played by The Cannons Scholars in Dorchester Abbey, but I caught The Dufay Collective's late nighter there, along with maybe fifty other people. Al Manere Minstrelsy, an hour of songs and dance music from 13th and 14th century England could hardly have been bettered, especially in such an appropriately ancient building. Dufay Collective originals William Lyons and Peter Skuce were joined by John Banks and Vivien Ellis, along with their customary crop of flutes, recorders, harps, percussion, bagpipes and simfony and kept everyone entertained marvellously with virtuoso playing and singing, not to mention some very good jokes. This was wonderful stuff, historically as informed as the Dufays always are, in which the only (literal) dampener was having to trip out into the rain after the encored Sumer is icumen in. 'Sing Cucu', ho,ho,ho. If this sampler day was a reflection
of the excellence of the whole festival - and there's every reason
to think that it was - then it deserves wholehearted support
from everyone who loves English music. The range of the programme
was as impressive as the quality of the artists taking part.
Ticket prices were reasonable too, even though festival funds
come only from ticket sales, the Friends scheme and a few Trusts,
Funds and composer societies on which the enterprise is wholly dependent. So
unique as EMF may be, force majeur it is very tightly budgeted and
will need as much help as possible to survive: I urge everyone to
help sustain its future. Concerts blend the reassuringly familiar with the less well known.
There's music by Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams and Finzi alongside
the revivals, and it was to those good causes that the opening concert,
the BBC Concert Orchestra under Barry Wordsworth, was devoted, with
pieces by Alan Rawsthorne, Alexander Mackenzie, and, more substantially,
the symphonic poem The Birds of Rhiannon by
Joseph Holbrooke, and the Celtic Symphony by
Granville Bantock. Holbrooke (1878-1958) is a curious figure, born
in Croydon but obsessed with Celtic culture in his eight operas and
orchestral works. He was known as the "Cockney Wagner",
but his music seems more indebted to César Franck. The
Birds of Rhiannon draws its themes from an operatic trilogy
and shapes them into a sprawling movement that adds up to less than
the sum of its sometimes winningly scored parts. Bantock's 1940 Celtic
Symphony, for strings and harps is an even odder amalgam of
Scottish folk tunes and spacious, Vaughan Williams-like sonorities
that, like much of Bantock, deserves occasional airings, probably
at gatherings of the faithful just like this one. |
